In today's environment of increasing postal rates, increasing paper costs, and other associated increasing costs of mailing, expenditures for mailing items have risen to a level which makes it desirable to be able to charge-back, or pass through, those mailing expenditures to those clients or customers to whom such costs can be identified. Such an ability to charge-back costs is preferable to charging all mailing costs off as an overhead expense, as has generally occurred in the past.
A number of attempts have been made to systematically identify mailing costs with particular accounts: for example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,962,459 for "System for Accounting for Postage Expended by a Postage Meter Having Data Security During Printing" to Mallozzi et al. discloses a postal system which responds to entry of postal information via an input interface and receives postal-amounts information via an interface to update an account record. The Mallozzi et al. system comprises a data entry apparatus, such as a keyboard, an interface, a printer, a memory (including a non-volatile memory), and a central processing unit.
Other attempts at controlling postal costs and attributing those costs to particular accounts via an account code system are represented by U.S. Pat. No. 4,908,770 for "Mail Management System Account Validation and Fallback Operation" to Breault et al., and U.S. Pat. No. 4,941,091 for "Mail Management System Transaction Data Customizing and Screening" to Breault et al. Both of these patents employ a computer-based system capable of working with a plurality of work stations connected and communicating with postage machines. Both systems are suited to large organizations or operations but are too costly for smaller-size operations.
Of course, the costs of mail have increased for small operations as well as large operations, and it is perhaps even more important to recapture mailing costs in a small operation.